With the mature development and popularity of 3G technologies, the competition between the operators becomes more and more intense. The sales of mobile terminal equipments more and more use the operator customization, and wherein, a function for locking a card is one of very important customization methods. A mobile phone with the function of locking a card can only use one or more subscriber identification module (SIM) cards customized by the operators, while the other SIM cards cannot be used normally when inserted in this model of the mobile phone terminal.
With the locking card function, the users can only be guaranteed to use the SIM cards of specific operators in order to protect the benefits of the operators. Most of the current locking card technologies bind a SIM card by using the mobile country code (MCC) as well as mobile network code (MNC) of the International Mobile Subscriber Identification Number (IMSI) of the SIM card, or by storing the IMSI number of the SIM card into the mobile phone. The first method cannot accurately distinguish several types of SIM cards from an identical operator, since the MCCs and MNCs of these SIM cards are the same. The drawback of the second method is that the number of IMSI numbers stored in the mobile phone is limited, so as the number of the locked SIM cards. Given the limitations of the above two methods, there are requirements on binding different types of the SIM cards from the identical operator, and there should be no limitation on the number of the SIM cards to be bound.
The SIM Tool Kit (STK) function contains a set of commands for the terminal and the SIM card to interact with each other, so that the SIM card can be used to run an application program in the card so as to achieve value-added services. Herein, the set of commands are two types of commands of the STK function, one type is an envelope command that is sent by the terminal to the SIM card, the other type is the proactive command that is actively sent by SIM card to the terminal. The SIM card and the terminal interact with each other by these two types of commands. The STK functions, that is the value-added services, of different operators are not the same, and the STK functions, that is value-added services, of different types of SIM cards from the identical operator are not the same either, which makes locking a SIM card with the STK function of the SIM card possible.